Excerpts from fREW Schmidt's message of Tue Jun 02 18:41:44 -0600 2009:

Hey guys,

I am using xmonad with gnome on my dual screen desktop and I am getting some really weird results. Windows will show up correctly on both monitors, but switching desktops (with Meta 1, 2, 3) doesn't switch both of the monitors, only the active one. It's like the non active screen follows me and sometimes switches sides... Very strange.

Any ideas what could be wrong?

Each physical screen by default shows a different workspace. When you mod-N to a different *visible* workspace, the current one swaps with the other one. you can change that if you don't like the swapping, (see section below about greedyView and view), but with mod-w,e,r to focus different screens this default behaviour works quite well for many people. To illustrate with two monitors, using the convention "[1*] [3 ]" to mean workspaces 1 and 3 are visible with left monitor the currently active one: [1*] [3 ] -- mod-3 --> [3*] [1 ] -- mod-e, mod-4 --> [1 ] [4*] [1 ] [4*] -- mod-1, mod-w --> [4*] [1 ] By replacing the 'greedyView' function with 'view' in the workspace switching bindings (copy from the Template xmonad.hs for your xmonad version) you can have your focus shift to the monitor displaying the given workspace, instead of having that workspace 'brought to you.' For example: [1*] [3 ] -- mod-3 --> [1 ] [3*] -- mod-4 --> [1 ] [4*] [1 ] [4*] -- mod-1, mod-4 --> [4*] [1 ] There is an example of replacing greedyView with view at http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/?title=Xmonad/Frequently_asked_questions#Repl... -- wmw

fREW Schmidt writes:

Hey guys,

I am using xmonad with gnome on my dual screen desktop and I am getting some really weird results.  Windows will show up correctly on both monitors, but switching desktops (with Meta 1, 2, 3) doesn't switch both of the monitors, only the active one.  It's like the non active screen follows me and sometimes switches sides...  Very strange.

Any ideas what could be wrong?

As the others have said, this is expected behaviour. The reason it seems so strange is probably that your gnome workspace switcher doesn't understand what's going on at all, and, unfortunately, there's no way to make it behave sanely with dual screen xmonad.